Mile Budak

Mile Budak was born in Sveti Rok, in Lika, which was then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.[1] He attended school in Sarajevo and studied law at the University of Zagreb.[2] In 1912, he was arrested by Austro-Hungarian authorities over his alleged role in the attempted assassination of Slavko Cuvaj, Croatian ban (viceroy).

Budak after the assassination attempt, 1932

Nazi collaborator Haj Amin al-Husseini and Mile Budak meeting in occupied Sarajevo, 1943.

Budak and Vladko Maček served as lawyers representing Marko Hranilović and Matija Soldin at trial amid the January 6th Dictatorship. On 7 June 1932, he survived an assassination attempt by operatives close to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Afterwards, he migrated to Italy to join the Ustaše and become the commander of an Ustaše training camp.[1] In 1938, he returned to Zagreb where he began publishing the weekly newspaper Hrvatski narod. The newspaper was vocal in its criticism of the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS) and opposed the Cvetković–Maček Agreement, by which the autonomous Banovina of Croatia was created. In 1940, the authorities of the Banovina of Croatia banned the newspaper and had Budak arrested, along with 50 other Ustaše members.[3] They were first interned in a prison in Lepoglava, and were later transferred to Kruščica near Travnik.[4] On 31 March 1941, in a joint letter to Hitler, Pavelić and Budak asked him "to help Croatian people establish an independent Croatian state that would encompass the old Croatian regions, among them Bosnia and Herzegovina".[5]

When the Independent State of Croatia was proclaimed, Budak became the state's chief propagandist[6] and Minister of Education and Faith.[7] As such, he publicly stated that forcible expulsion and religious conversion of the ethnic Serb minority was the official national policy. Budak signed the Ustashe regime's racial laws against Serbs, Jews, and Roma.[8] Croatian novelist Miroslav Krleža described Budak as "a minister of culture with a machine gun".[1] According to an alleged statement, reportedly said by Budak, the Ustaše plan was to "kill one part of the Serbs, evacuate another and lead over one part to Catholicism and thus transform them into Croats." The origins of this statement are unclear. According to Veljko Bulajić, the statement originates from a speech in Gospić on 22 July 1941. Other authors claim that it came in a radio broadcast, while some attribute it to Dido Kvaternik. In a report to the Yugoslav government-in-exile, the statement was attributed to Andrija Artuković. There are various versions of the quote that differ in wording. The historian Tomislav Dulić said that he "tried to find a primary source that could confirm the existence and exact wording of this statement", but was "not been able to ascertain whether such a statement actually exists".[9]

He later became Croatian envoy to Nazi Germany (November 1941 – April 1943) and foreign minister (May 1943 – November 1943).[10][11] When the Independent State of Croatia collapsed, Budak was captured by British military authorities and handed over to Tito's Partisans on 18 May 1945. He was court-martialled (before the military court of the 2nd Yugoslav army) in Zagreb on 6 June 1945 and was sentenced to death by hanging the same day. His execution the following day took place exactly 13 years after the assassination attempt on his life.[12] During the trial, Budak was described to behave "cowardly, constantly weeping, and claiming he was not guilty of anything".[13]

Budak was known for his literary work, especially novels and plays in which he had glorified Croatian peasantry. His works included Ognjište (The Hearth),[14] Opanci dida Vidurine (Grandpa Vidurina's Shoes),[15] and Rascvjetana trešnja (The Blossoming Cherry Tree).

About Budak's writing, E.E. Noth wrote: "Here we find the stubborn, spiritual-realistic conception of man and his relation to the soil on which he lives and which Mile Budak symbolizes as 'the hearth'".[16]

After the war his books were banned by Yugoslav Communist authorities. Thus, many Croatian nationalists viewed Budak as a great figure of Croatian literature, equal, if not superior to the leftist Miroslav Krleža.[2] Following Croatian independence in the early 1990s, the Croatian Democratic Union badly wanted to reinterpret the fascist Ustasha quislings of World War II as a Croatian patriotic force. Hence, the reissue in early 1993 of the collected works of Mile Budak,the second-in-command in the Ustasha regime. Commenting, at the time of this reissue, Croatian writer Giancarlo Kravar wrote: "... Ustashism, in its history, was undoubtly also a positive political movement for the state-building affirmation of Croatianism, the expression of the centuries-long aspiration of the Croatian people"[17]

For others, Budak was "a mediocre Croatian author",[18] "a mediocre writer at best",[19] "a writer of middling originality and imagination"[20] or a writer which literary work is "average and without lasting value".[21]

As of August 2004, there were seventeen cities in Croatia which had streets named after Budak.[22] As of August 2012, at least one street in Bosnia and Herzegovina is named after Budak (in Mostar). The Archdiocese of Zagreb declared at one point that it had no objection to the erection of a monument dedicated to the dead Ustaša leader.[23]